The truth of these statements is so notorious as scarcely to require demonstration, were it not for the fact that with the passing of the relations that prevailed between the two races on the frontier a century ago our knowledge of them threatens to disappear. Almost any number of witnesses of unimpeachable authority might be cited to show the unjust administration of the regulations governing the intercourse between the two races. Said Hamtramck to St. Clair in 1790: "The people of our frontiers will be the first to break any treaty. The people of Kentucky will carry on private expeditions and will kill Indians whenever they meet them, and I do not believe there is a jury in all Kentucky who would punish a man for it."[461] This opinion was substantially repeated by Washington, who affirmed that the "frontier settlers entertain the opinion that there is not the same crime (or indeed no crime at all) in killing an Indian as in killing a white man."[462]
[461] Winsor, Westward Movement, 421.
[462] Ibid.
No man understood better the conditions that prevailed on the northwestern frontier than did General Harrison. His letters and messages abound in accounts of acts of violence and other crimes committed against the Indians, and of the impossibility of obtaining justice for them. By the treaties the Indians guilty of murder were to be surrendered to the whites, and whatever the form of trial were practically certain of punishment, while, as Hamtramck observed, western juries almost invariably acquitted white men guilty of the same offense. "The Indian always suffers, and the white man never," said Harrison to the Indiana legislature in 1806, in a message appealing for a redress of this grievance.[463] A year later, in discussing the subject of Indian unrest, the Governor returned to the same theme, expressing the opinion that the utmost efforts of the British to incite the Indians to make war upon the Americans would be unavailing "if one only of the many persons who have committed murders on their people, could be brought to punishment."[464] It had even come to pass from the partiality shown the whites in the enforcement of the laws that the Indians proudly compared their own observance of the treaty stipulations with that of their boasted superiors.[465]
[463] Dillon, History of Indiana, 424.
[464] Dawson, Historical Narrative of the Civil and Military Services of Major-General William H. Harrison, 97.
[465] Governor Harrison to the Indiana legislature, printed in Dillon, History of Indiana, 424. In a letter to Harrison from the War Department (unsigned), July 17, 1806, relative to the murder of an Indian occurs the following: "It is excessively mortifying that our good faith should so frequently be called in question by the natives who have it in their power to make such proud comparison in relation to good faith."—Indian Office, Letter Book B, 240.
An event reported by General Harrison in 1802 well illustrates the workings of the prejudice which rendered persons guilty of acts of violence against the Indians immune from punishment.[466] An Indian was barbarously murdered by a white man. The offender was a man of infamous character for whom no sympathy was felt, and the evidence of guilt was incontestable. Yet the jury, in obedience to the sentiment that no white man ought to suffer for the murder of an Indian, in a few minutes brought in a verdict of acquittal. A case which attracted a good deal of attention and served to embitter the minds of the Indians occurred about the beginning of the century. An entire party consisting of several persons, men, women, and children, was foully murdered by three white villains for the sake of a paltry fifty dollars' worth of peltry which they owned. The murder was revealed through the boasting of the murderers themselves. Governor Harrison made strenuous efforts to secure their punishment, but because of the active sentiment against punishing white men for killing Indians these were rendered of no avail.[467] In a similar manner in 1812 a trader who had killed an Indian at Vincennes was acquitted by the jury almost without deliberation.[468] Shortly after this the house of a white man was robbed by a Delaware Indian. To the demand that the culprit be given up for trial the chiefs of the tribe replied that they would never surrender another man until some of the white murderers of their own people had been punished; they would, however, punish him themselves, and this promise they kept by putting him to death.[469] Another illustration of the sense of injustice felt by the Indians over the one-sided administration of justice as between the two races, is afforded by the spirited speech of Main Poc, the Pottawatomie chief who lived near the junction of the Des Plaines and the Kankakee rivers, to the agent of Governor Edwards in 1811. To the latter's demand for the surrender of certain red men accused of committing murders among the whites Main Poc replied: "You astonish us with your talk. When you do us harm nothing is done, but when we do anything you immediately tie us by the neck."[470]
[466] Dawson, Harrison, 45.
[467] Ibid., 7-8, 31-32.